My Rainier - Other Snow Cave

I have a few more pictures I wanted to add. Here is some of the wildlife we saw. This fox was posing on the side of the road. Everyone, including us, stopped for a picture.

Here is one of the boys in our last snow cave:

Here are a bunch of the boys in the same snow cave:

Mt. Rainier Igloo

Not everyone likes to lay in the snow. They make igloos. The boys had fun helping with this project. With the snow saws, constructing the blocks was really easy.

Sleds make transporting the larger blocks a lot easier.

It is a little skinny but we were lacking a structural engineer to design a king truss large enought to span a space for all the boys.

Here is how they cut the blocks from the snow - just cut into a little hill until you level it some.

It seems like TNT would be easier to level this structure.

Mt Rainier Going Down

After explaining to the scouts the concept of glissading (sliding down the mountain), they were not about to continue walking down hill. Here are some pictures.

Mt Rainier Snowshoing

We were luck enough to get some rentals from REI. Below is what I was using.The snow hike was fun while we were able to do it. The trees are so interesting up there. They have a very short growing season, because of the cold and lack of light.

Looking close at the trees, you can see that there were little icecycles. It is interesting that these are formed sideways instead of down. I think it is due to the constant wind and lack of sunshine-induced melting.

Here are two more pictures of our group:

Mt Rainier Visibility

The visibility on this hike was less than ideal. After getting pointed in the right direction, we started hiking. I pulled out my compass just to get readings on where we were going. After a while a cross-country skier passed us who looked like he knew where he was going. We followed him for a while.The skier was too fast for us. His pace was breaking up our group and so we needed to stop to regroup. Here is the back of the group...

and here is the front of the group. We decided that it wasn't wise to do our full hike because of the lack of visibility and still not knowing where the trail was.

During our lunch break, we saw several groups come down the hill. They weren't really taking the same path down. Each group seemed to wander downhill figuring they would find the base. (It is times like this when it is important to have a whistle if you get lost.)

Here is a good example of the visibility, one scout with nothing-ness behind.

During the breaks, the scouts found renewed energy to run around and throw snow balls.

Mt. Rainier Scout Caves

Even though we weren't going to use them, we had fun digging snow caves. Here are some pictures of the boys digging.

For safety, we need to collapse the caves we make so other people don't end up like our scout below.